Zap Surgical Systems Inc. reported closing a $78 million series E funding round led by Qingdao Baheal Medical Inc., with participation from other strategic investors. The new funds will be used to commercialize the company’s Zap-X gyroscopic radiosurgery platform for the non-invasive treatment of brain tumors.

Early-stage breast cancer patients in the U.S. may soon be able to access another treatment regime based on the result of a Nov. 7 FDA advisory committee for the Prosense cryoablation system by Icecure Medical Ltd. The advisory committee voted 9-5 that the benefits of Prosense outweigh the risks, although the FDA has yet to decide on the application.

While the size of the market is enormous, drug development and treatments for women’s health care still lag behind what is offered for men. There has been a renaissance in the past few years, however, led by investors and companies that have wrestled with determining exactly what encompasses women’s health and how to meet its challenges.

Prognomiq Inc. secured $34 million in a series D funding round to advance development of an early detection test for lung cancer based on its multiomics platform. The blood-based test could provide an alternative to the underutilized low-dose CT scans currently recommended for individuals at high-risk of lung cancer.

For Inocras Inc., the benefits of whole genome sequencing are two-fold. First is its explicit usefulness in diagnosing and treating hard-to-treat diseases like cancer and rare diseases. The second, less apparent, benefit lies in the data generated in the process, and its applications to current and future generations of cancer patients.

The first filing from Cancerrisk AI Inc. describes their development of a system that uses deep learning to predict future cancer risk from a biopsy image.

The third PCT family of patenting to emerge from IR Medtek LLC, and its first as the sole named assignee, sees its CEO, Douglas Cohen, continue to build protection for the company’s platform which uses a light detection technology and machine learning to improve the accuracy of cancer diagnosis.

Currently, cancer therapy trial-and-error methodology is inefficient and unsustainable. Oncology is the worst therapeutic area for drug trial success; only 3.4% of drugs that enter phase I end up being FDA approved, and 57% fail due to poor drug efficacy in trials. Building tools that may aid in predicting an individual’s response to a specific therapy may help in reducing costs, guesswork, and importantly improve the outcome of patients and accelerate new drug development.

A recent retrospective cohort study of Insight MMG highlighted potential of Lunit Inc.’s artificial intelligence-powered breast cancer screening tool in detecting “subtle signs of cancer” earlier for women.

Early results from REFLECTION, a real-world study, mirrored results for Grail Inc.'s multi-cancer early detection (MCED) assay in clinical trials, according to a presentation at the 2024 Early Detection of Cancer Conference. The study, conducted at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) sites, focuses on the real-world application of the Galleri test, which screens for multiple cancers in asymptomatic individuals.